OPEC agrees to extend oil production cut for nine months

27 Mai 2017

The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) reached a deal with Russian Federation and other major producers on Thursday to prolong output cuts for nine months until the end of March 2018.

Oil cartel members meeting in Europe agreed Thursday to extend petroleum production cuts into 2018, as they seek to regain market power amid a surge of USA shale output that has kept fuel prices low.

The price of oil is down further after OPEC and other nations said they had agreed to extend their production cuts for another nine months.

OPEC's cuts have helped push oil back above $50 per barrel this year.

Oil markets remained weak on Friday after tumbling in the previous session when OPEC and allied producers extended output cuts but disappointed investors betting on longer or larger supply curbs.

Rising U.S. production may continue to offset OPEC's cuts, even though refining runs have touched record levels in the United States in recent weeks.

The goal is to siphon off a global oversupply of oil caused by a flood of production from USA shale producers and record levels of output from OPEC itself in 2016.

OPEC have been accused of "tinkering at the margins" by curbing production by around 1.8m barrels a day along with several non-OPEC members. "And to this end we have a technical committee working on this every month", he told CNBC in Vienna when asked about the possibility of deeper cuts to production.

The problem for OPEC is that while crude sits substantially below the highs around $100 a barrel reached in 2014, it is high enough to bring back into the market USA producers who eased back as prices tumbled past year.

Saudi Arabia and Russian Federation have spent the past week garnering broad-based support to extend the cut.

"In this regard, the aforementioned non-OPEC countries chose to extend their production adjustments, which originally started 1 January 2017, for a further period of nine months, beginning 1 July 2017", OPEC said.